SR: So how did an IT expert in the health field become an authority on the history of barbecue?

RM: It actually happened the other way around. I was studying for a Ph.D. in English at the University of South Carolina, and as I was finishing up my dissertation I got more and more interested in food history, including barbecue history, and started it researching it on the side. I ended up making a career in the software industry (long story there), but I kept up the historical research on the side and eventually published the first edition of Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, in 2010. I’ve been writing about barbecue ever since.

SR: This is one of my favorite history books—not just about barbecue, but about America. What’s new and different in the second edition?

RM: There are two big differences. First, since the original edition was published in 2010, many other writers have dug into the history of barbecue, and between their discoveries and my own continued research I was able to really expand the story and fill in some of the missing gaps in the original book. In particular, I delve much more deeply into the Caribbean roots of American barbecue, added the stories of more of the influential barbecue figures from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and discuss more American regional barbecue styles, including Kentucky’s mutton tradition and the ribs and ribs tips cooked in aquarium smokers on the south side of Chicago.

Second, I added an entirely new chapter that covers everything that has happened in the barbecue world since 2010, which has been a lot. Amazingly, the first edition of the book had already been sent to the press when Aaron Franklin opened his first barbecue trailer on the side of Interstate 35 in Austin, Texas. The explosion of what many now call “craft barbecue” all happened after that, so I added a full chapter to just bring the story up to today.

SR: You show us how barbecue has been woven into the fabric of American culture since the arrival of the first Europeans in the New World and long before. How does barbecue make us American and how have Americans influenced live fire cooking?

RM: It’s amazing how many aspects of American life have intersected with barbecue over the years—the Fourth of July, elections and politics, building the railroads, the Temperance movement and civic reforms, the settling of the West, fighting wars, and so much more. From the beginning barbecues have been where Americans came together to celebrate, enjoy each other’s company, advance important causes, and build community. It’s truly the one food tradition that is most firmly intertwined with the notion of what being an American is.

SR: At this point, it’s common knowledge that our term barbecue comes from the Taino Indian word barbacoa—a sort of grill made of sticks and logs and positioned over a fire—and that the word first appeared in print in 1526 in a book called Natural History of the West Indies, written by one Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes. By the 18th century, barbecues were a popular pastime in Colonial America. I’ve always been puzzled by the “missing link.” What’s the first mention of the term “barbecue” in what would become the United States and how did barbecue get from the Caribbean to here?

RM: Like a lot of things in culinary history, the answer to this one is that we just don’t know for certain. In 1585, Thomas Hariot, a member of Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed Roanoke Island colony, recorded the Native Americans there broiling their fish in a manner similar to what de Oviedo y Valdes observed in Central America, but he didn’t use the term “barbecue” to describe it.

More than a century later, in 1705, Robert Beverley wrote in The History of Virginia that local tribes broiled meat by “laying it upon sticks raised upon forks at some distance above the live coals . . . this they, and we also from them, call barbecuing.” Somewhere in between, British colonists began cooking pigs and other animals in a similar fashion and using the word barbecue to describe it. By the 1730s there are numerous references in colonial diaries and newspapers to events called “barbecues,” and it quickly became an entrenched part of the social life of the American colonies.

It’s an open question whether British colonists and/or their enslaved African workers developed the practice in the Caribbean and then brought it to the mainland or whether it evolved separately in the American colonies. How much of the technique was borrowed from Native American cooking practices (versus just taking the word) is also a subject of much debate among historians. The closest answer I can give is that sometime in the 17th century, there was an intersection of Native American, European, and African American food cultures in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland, and out of that intersection a new form of American cooking called barbecue emerged by the early 1700s.

SR: Following up on that previous question: Barbacoa originated in the Caribbean—a region that served as the jumping off point for the colonization of every country in North and South America. Why did barbecue experience its fullest flowering here and not elsewhere?

RM: Again, that one’s a little hard to answer with certainty. My theory is that barbecue took root especially firmly in the colony of Virginia because, first, the colonists who settled the Tidewater came from southwest and western England, where there was a deep-rooted culture of roasting and broiling and feasting was vital part of the cultural life. Also, Virginia had lots of pigs, which were a natural fit for the barbecue pit. Early on, a “barbecue day”—that is, a day of feasting and recreation with a barbecue at its center—became a key part of Virginians’ social calendar, and the practice remained very rooted in the culture after that.

SR: Most of us learn that the American Revolution began with the Boston Tea Party, but you cite an earlier event involving barbecue. Tell us about it.

RM: My friend William McKinney has been lobbying the North Carolina legislature (unsuccessfully, so far) to declare the “New Hanover Barbecue” to be an official state holiday.

It would commemorate an event in 1766 in New Hanover, North Carolina, that occurred at a time of high tensions over the recently passed Stamp Act. It started when several militia companies from nearby counties marched to the town of Brunswick and refused to allow a cargo of stamped paper be brought ashore. At the next militia muster a few weeks later in New Hanover, an alarmed Governor William Tryon tried to placate the troops by treating them to a whole barbecued ox and several barrels of beer. When called to the feast, the soldiers mocked Tryon’s gesture, poured the beer onto the ground, and pitched the ox into the Cape Fear River.

This was seven years before those Yankees dressed up like Mohawk warriors and dumped a few chests of tea into Boston harbor, and wouldn’t a giant barbecue be much better than a boring tea party for commemorating colonists’ protests against taxation without representation?

SR: In the book, you bring to life many of the forgotten heroes of American barbecue. Tell us about some of the more colorful characters you encountered in your research.

RM: One of the most colorful characters is certainly John W. Callaway, the famous 300-pound “barbecuing sheriff” of Wilkes County, Georgia, who became famous across the country for cooking massive outdoor barbecues. Though Callaway was a showman who knew how to wow the crowds (and, especially, Northern reporters visiting Georgia), the one actually leading the cooking at the pits was an African American man named Henry Pettus, who worked for Callaway. In the new edition of the book I was able to dig up some more of Pettus’s story and add it to the narrative.

I also tell for the first time the story of two famous barbecue cooks in Augusta, Georgia, Gus Ferguson and Pickens Wells, who became famous for the barbecues they staged between the 1880s and the early 20th century. Wells prepared the barbecue for President-elect William Howard Taft when he visited Augusta in 1909, and Taft so enjoyed the meal that he took a tour of the pits after dinner and complimented Wells on his cooking.

Other notable characters include Henry Perry, the first barbecue king of Kansas City who trained an entire generation of pitmasters who followed, and John Mills, the Memphis rib king, who in the 1930s started shipping his ribs via air mail to loyal customers, many of them Hollywood celebrities.

SR: How important was the African American contribution to American barbecue?

RM: Immense. As the book details, African American were doing the cooking at almost all of the early barbecues in the 19th century, and they passed down their techniques and recipes from one generation to the next. During the early 20th century, many of the first restaurateurs were African American, and they helped define and disseminate what later became America’s great regional barbecue styles. Whether you are talking Houston, Chicago, Memphis, or Kansas City, African American restaurateurs were instrumental in defining each city’s signature barbecue style.

SR: One fact I found mind-boggling was the sheer size of 19th century American barbecues. Tell us about the largest barbecue you’ve discovered. How did so much food get cooked and served in an age without refrigeration, golf carts, or walkie talkies?

RM: There are at least two contenders for the largest barbecue in American history, since those events were free to all comers and newspaper reporters had to estimate the attendance. In 1895, the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for veterans of the Union army, staged its annual National Encampment and invited veterans from the Confederate Army for a gathering with reconciliation as the theme. Well over 100,000 veterans and their guests attended, and the famed Kentucky barbecuer Gus Jaubert led a team of 350 cooks as they roasted 45 beeves, 383 sheep, and 241 pigs and made 12,000 gallons of burgoo, Kentucky’s iconic barbecue stew.

A quarter century later, in 1922, the populist politician Jack Walton was elected governor of Oklahoma and decided to stage an old-fashioned barbecue for his inauguration and invite the entire state. It was held at the state fairgrounds, and Oklahoma farmers contributed thousands of cows, hogs, sheep, and chickens as well as 103 turkeys, 1,363 rabbits, 26 squirrels, 134 opossums, 113 geese, 15 deer, 2 buffalo, and 2 reindeer shipped in from up north. These were cooked on six parallel trenches in the ground that stretched almost a mile in total. The Dallas Morning News considered 100,000 attendees to be “a conservative estimate,” so it might have been larger than the Grand Army of the Republic event.

How they pulled it out without golf carts and walkie talkies, I have no idea!

SR: How has American barbecue evolved in the last three centuries.

RM: That’s a book length topic! But, to sum it up by century, barbecue in the 18th century was a popular social event in the American colonies—a small, outdoor form of feasting and celebration. In the 19th century it evolved into a large-scale civic institution, drawing thousands of people together for massive, free outdoor celebrations that knit entire communities together. It also spread southward from Virginia and then westward across the United States as the country expanded, with settlers taking it all the way to the Pacific Coast and making it truly a national tradition.

In the 20th century barbecue became commercialized, and the rise of barbecue stands and then barbecue restaurants transformed the techniques from large-scale, outdoor feasts to more regular, small-scale daily operations. In the process, the now-beloved American regional styles—the type of meats, the sauces, the side dishes—were codified, as restaurateurs standardized their operations and taught their methods to the next generation.

Finally, here in the 21st century, we are enjoying a remarkable resurgence of barbecue after it declined and almost faded out in the 1970s and 1980s. The rise of neo-traditionalist or “craft” barbecue, a return to all-wood cooking, and a fusion of traditional techniques with flavors from around the world are all part of this flowering. American barbecue is also taking the world by storm, as people around the globe are organizing barbecue competitions and opening American-style barbecue restaurants.

I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Robert F. Moss is a food writer and culinary historian living in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the contributing barbecue editor for Southern Living, the restaurant critic for the Charleston City Paper, and frequent contributor to publications like Serious Eats, Saveur, The Local Palate, Early American Life, and Garden & Gun.

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~~

Juneteenth celebrates the day June 19, 1865, when the Union Army’s Major General Gordon Granger, commanding officer, District of Texas, read “General Order No. 3” stating: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” This happened two years and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Originally, it was called the “19th of June” or the “June 19th” celebration. By the 1910s, people inside, and outside, of Texas called it “Juneteenth.” After years of lobbying, the State of Texas recognized Juneteenth as an official state holiday in 1980. Though Juneteenth started out in Texas, migrating Texans have transplanted the celebration all across the nation. Surprisingly, Juneteenth has now supplanted the local and traditional Emancipation celebrations of most communities—even celebrations that had a deep and rich history. It’s the most popular and widely celebrated Emancipation celebration in the country, and it shows you the power that Texas cheerleaders have for expanding their culture and food traditions.

“Barbecue and baseball” had long been Juneteenth’s unofficial motto. Black communities would come together on church grounds, or in public recreational spaces to celebrate with food, music, and games, especially baseball. Given its declined popularity among Black youth, the “baseball” part no longer applies. That’s not the case with barbecue. Barbecue is the most popular down-home dish served at these celebrations. Mr. Paul Darby, a Juneteenth celebrant, noted the special cultural significance ascribed to barbecue: “They really set aside that day for special cooking—you didn’t eat the same thing, you know, like everyday—that day you had special food, barbecue beef, mutton, pork, everything is ‘specially set aside for that day.” Juneteenth is also marked by eating “red foods.” In addition to barbecue (red because of the sauce), the Juneteenth “trinity” includes a red drink, and a ripe watermelon.

Though many Texans prefer to wash their food down with Big Red Soda from Waco, Texas, my red drink of choice these days is hibiscus aid. The recipe is from the Virgin Islands, and it’s quite refreshing.

Blog post excerpted from Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. Recipe excerpted from Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. Both books are authored by Adrian Miller.

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“Night before the barbecues, I used to stay up all night cooking and basting the meats with barbecue sauce. It was made of vinegar, black and red pepper, salt, butter, a little sage, coriander, basil, onion, and garlic. Some folks drop a little sugar in it. On a long pronged stick, I wrapped a soft rag or cotton for a swab, and all night long, I swabbed the meat until it dripped into the fire. The drippings changed the smoke into seasoned fumes that smoked the meat. We turned the meat over and swabbed it that way all night long until it oozed seasoning and was baked all through.”

Thus recalled a former enslaved African American whose narrative was recorded by the WPA (Work Projects Administration) in the 1930s—a collection of 2,300 first person accounts of slavery. He spoke of an art inextricably interwoven with American cuisine—since our country’s founding and long before—an art every bit as near and dear to our hearts today: barbecue.

Simply defined, barbecue is meat slow-cooked over direct or indirect flame with wood smoke providing its flavor—and its soul. But there’s nothing simple about barbecue—not even about the word, which can be used as a verb, an adjective, or a noun. As a verb, barbecue means to cook meat low and slow over or next to a smoky fire, and more generally to cook meat outdoors. As an adjective, barbecue describes both a method and style of cooking. When used as a noun, its complexities become even more apparent, with at least three different meanings:

1. A food cooked with fire and wood smoke
2. An outdoor event or celebration built around food cooked with fire
3. The device over which such cooking is done—the so-called barbecue grill

And that’s before we get to regional barbecue, because in Texas, the word probably means brisket, in Memphis, ribs, in North Carolina, pulled pork, and in Salinas, California, grilled oysters.

Certainly, the conjoining of meat and flame has taken place for millennia in different parts of the world. There are grills and kebabs and mechoui and more, but the word that is dear to the hearts and stomachs of the New World comes from the Caribbean term barbacoa, the Taino word for the grill on which the meat was cooked.

According to barbecue historian Lolis Eric Elie, author of the seminal book Smokestack Lightning, the word barbacoa first appeared in print in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo’s 1526 account of his travels in the West Indies, De la Historia General y Natural de las Indias. It referred to a cooking device used by the Indians of Terra Firme, who roasted meat on sticks “like a grating or trivet over a pit.” Thus, the Spanish hidalgo uses the term to describe not a food or a method of cooking, but as a device: the grill upon which the food was cooked.

If the Caribbean region gave our unique culinary form its name, barbecue, the uniquely hemispheric cooking form was perfected in the hands of Black pit masters in the American South. At plantations throughout the South, barbecues (in the second sense of the word) were often staged when there were guests or festivities at the Big House. The cooks for these events were enslaved and free black men who used their talents to create an iconic Afro-Southern dish. The cooking ritual was a complex process replicated today by Black pit masters throughout the South.

That same basic process of slow cooking over smoke took place throughout the barbecue belt that runs from Maryland on down through Mississippi. Post Emancipation, it was carried North and West with The Great Migration by the likes of Henry Perry, born in Shelby County, Tennessee, who learned his trade working in steamboat kitchens plying the Mississippi River, and opened the first barbecue restaurant in Kansas City. Other early Black barbecue entrepreneurs included Arthur Bryant and George Gates of Kansas City and John “Big Daddy” Bishop of Dreamland Barbecue in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

As Black barbecue masters spread across the South and Midwest, their mop sauces evolved, and so did their marinades, rubs , and barbecue sauces. Barbecue scholars, and they are legion, have disserted on regional and even local differences. Competitions (pre-Covid, at least) have evolved into events attended by tens of thousands, with judging done by professional judges who attend “school” to become certified.

While the African American hand in the creation and development of American barbecue is often acknowledged, there have been surprisingly few books on the subject. Happily, that’s about to change. Soon background, history, and recipes will be available in the forthcoming work of African American pit masters and scholars: Culinary Historian Adrian Miller’s book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021, and rocket scientist and pit master Howard Conyers is also working on a book on the African American roots of the art of barbecue. There are cookbooks due out by master pit men Rodney Scott of Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ in Charleston, South Carolina, and Kevin Bludso of Bludso’s Bar & Que West Hollywood, California. (By the way, Bludso’s delivers barbecue nationwide. Call them at (323) 931-2583.)

We can’t wait for them to set the record straight.

African American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in her 1942 work, Dust Tracks on a Road, wrote, “Maybe all of us who do not have the good fortune to meet or meet again, in this world, will meet at a barbecue.” I’d like to add, with the new works coming out and while nibbling on burnt ends, sucking on rib bones, and wiping sticky fingers on paper napkins, I hope we will finally acknowledge the crucial African American role in the creation of this unique American culinary art.

About the Author

Jessica B. Harris is the author of 12 cookbooks documenting the food of the African Diaspora. She is the 2020 James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. Her latest book is Vintage Postcards from the African World (University Press of Mississippi, May 2020).

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The post From Plantation to Barbecue Joint: The Black Contribution to American Barbecue appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.

In my new book, Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America (University of Georgia Press), I tell the story of the food that embodies the United States better than any other.

While barbecue is a universal and timeless cooking technique that appears in many guises around the globe, we have made something uniquely American of it. Barbecue goes back to the earliest encounters between European explorers and indigenous populations in the New World. It involves almost every aspect of our history, from the colonial era to slavery to the settling of the West to the coming of immigrants to the Great Migration to the spread of the automobile and the more recent rediscovery of craft and tradition. It has roots on five continents and shows evidence of almost every ethnic thread that makes up our nation.

What else would you do on the Fourth of July but have a barbecue? It’s what they did at the dawn of the republic.

In 1793, when President George Washington officiated at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the U.S. Capitol building, they celebrated with barbecued ox. Even then, barbecue was thoroughly American.

Four decades before that momentous day, there was already a Barbecue Church in North Carolina. Seriously. Settlers near Sanford established the Barbecue Presbyterian Church in 1757, not because they were pork worshipers, but because the mists rising off the swamp reminded them of barbecue smoke. In other words, barbecue was a metaphor before the U.S, was even founded.

Smokelore isn’t a cookbook or a travelog or an academic monograph, although it has elements of those. It’s a lavishly illustrated popular history, with 50,000 words of text, 26 recipes and 208 pieces of artwork, many of them vintage photos and amusingly retro magazine ads. It’s solid history, but it’s meant to be, above all, entertaining.

The book began as the companion volume to “Barbecue Nation,” an exhibition about the history and culture of barbecue on view at the Atlanta History Center museum through Sept. 29. I was a consulting curator for that show and was asked to author the book because I had written about barbecue and many other foods as a reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for almost 30 years. I was a co-founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi and had won a James Beard Foundation award for my food writing.

But my resume isn’t why I took on this project. Barbecue is in my DNA. My great-grandfather and grandfather on my father’s side were noted pit masters in the Etowah River Valley of northwestern Georgia, my grandfather once having been written up in a 1954 article about Southern barbecue in the Saturday Evening Post magazine. My father and uncle specialized in Brunswick stew and taught me that mysterious art. Meanwhile, my mother’s family ran a slaughterhouse in middle Georgia making country sausage and staged the occasional pig-pickin’.

So barbecue is personal for me. It has been for many Americans, from George Washington on down. That, I think, is the point. This is our national food, and it deserves to be studied and celebrated as such.

Great Moments in Barbecue

1897: A patent for charcoal briquettes is awarded to Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer of Pennsylvania. Primarily used as a heating fuel, charcoal doesn’t become a barbecue staple until Henry Ford markets the brand that becomes Kingsford.

1907: Henry Perry, a steamboat cook from Tennessee, opens a barbecue stand in Kansas City, establishing one of the nation’s earliest barbecue restaurants and laying the foundation for one of the nation’s great barbecue centers.

1938: Sunset magazine publishes the first real barbecue cookbook. The California publication was instrumental in promoting backyard cooking, which started, not in Texas or the South, but on the West Coast.

1978: Memphis in May, one of the first and largest barbecue contests, starts on the banks of the Mississippi River. The competition circuit quickly multiplies, helping to drive a renewed interest in barbecue craft.

2015: Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, becomes the first pit master to win a James Beard Foundation award for best regional chef, signaling barbecue’s rising regard in culinary circles.

More About Smokelore and Jim Auchmutey:

• Buy the Book
• Jerked Snapper recipe from Smokelore

Do you agree that barbecue is the most American food? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the Barbecue Board!

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There was once a practical as well as a liturgical purpose behind Lent. Peasants couldn’t afford to overwinter their animals, so there was generally an ample supply of meat for months after the fall slaughter. The gluttony of Carnival in late winter gave butchers an opportunity to clean out their dwindling (likely rotting!) inventory. They closed their shops after Shrove Tuesday and traveled to the countryside to replenish their livestock.

In the U.S., New Orleans is the epicenter of Mardi Gras revelry (some would say debauchery). Traditional holiday foods—and Mardi Gras has been a legal holiday in Louisiana since 1875—include jambalaya, red beans and rice, fried oysters, crawfish étouffée, po’ boys, and muffuletta sandwiches, among others. And almost none of them grilled, smoked, or barbecued! Even New Orleans’ deceptively-named “barbecued shrimp” is sautéed on the stovetop.

Let’s correct this lame state of affairs by firing up our grills and smokers on “Fat Tuesday.” Take a look at this menu:

Bayou Wings with Cajun Remoulade
Smoked Chicken and Sausage Gumbo
NOLA Smoked Shrimp
Thelma’s Dirty Rice
Deconstructed Bananas Foster

So laissez les bons temps rouler! Let the good times roll!

The post Go Wild on Fat Tuesday with Wings, Shrimp, and Much More! appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.

Like many island cuisines, jerk is wholly dependent on ingredients found right there on Jamaica—primarily, sadistic little chiles called Scotch bonnets, bay leaves, allspice, scallions, thyme, and native pimento wood.

Versions of jerk have been around since the mid-1600s when African slaves escaped their Spanish captors after the British invaded Jamaica. Called the Maroons, these fierce and resourceful survivors adapted cooking methods from their homeland, digging pits, constructing fragrant grates out of green pimento or sweet wood (bay), and roasting wild pigs. (Yes, pork—not chicken—was the original jerk.) The environment was both spicy and steamy, but corralled the fragrant smoke that could have given away their positions.

The word “jerk” may come from the Carib/Arawak Indian word charqui, which eventually evolved into jerky, and then jerk. A skilled practitioner is called a jerk master.

If you’ve eaten authentic jerk, you know there’s an elusive flavor that can be difficult to recreate at home. The secret is pimento wood. A little over ten years ago, Minneapolis-based Gary Feblowitz was on a Jamaican vacation when a diving injury extended his stay by almost two weeks. Today, he is the only U.S. importer (his website is called PimentoWood.com) approved by Jamaican authorities to bring this unique wood to the country. Recently, he began selling a line of jerk products—pimento sticks, chips, chunks, pellets, planks, sweet wood, and pre-made rubs and marinades—on Amazon.com, making it easier than ever to throw a Jamaican-themed barbecue bash.

Scotch bonnet chiles can also be difficult to find in the U.S. Feel free, however, to substitute habaneros or even serranos, though the flavors will be less fruity. As for the reason behind the shortage, I was told squatty Scotch bonnets were being used to smuggle drugs into the country and are now banned. I couldn’t verify this, and in any case, they are now being cultivated in California. Scotch bonnets are extremely hot, so be sure to wear latex gloves or thoroughly wash your hands after handling.

Steven’s recipe for jerk pork, which originally appeared in Planet Barbecue, is one of my favorites. He maximizes the surface area by scoring the pork, allowing more of those aromatic flavors and spices to penetrate the meat.

For the real deal, lay sticks of pimento or sweet wood directly on the grill grate; this will be a rack for your pork. (Chicken can be cooked this way, too. For a recipe, click here.) Or build a bed of bay leaves under the meat before smoking. You can also pleat a couple of sheets of heavy duty aluminum foil into a pouch. Add whole allspice berries, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves to the pouch and close. Poke holes in the pouch, then position it on the coals or underneath the grill grate.

Pimento wood is quite dense, and can be used for more than one grill session.

Side dishes like rice and beans, coleslaw, and a Jamaican fry bread called festival make great accompaniments. (For a recipe for the latter, see The Barbecue! Bible.) Play Jamaican steel drum music, break out the Red Stripe beer or rummy cocktails, and enjoy an island idyll. Ya, mon!

Make Jamaican Jerk Pork for yourself:
Real Jamaican Jerk Pork
Jerk Seasoning
Jerk Marinade
Island Vinegar Sauce
Vinegar Slaw

Tell us how it goes on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or the Barbecue Board.

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There’s certainly no shame in taking the party indoors when temperatures fall below zero. Or maybe you’re one of millions of condo or apartment dwellers who are prevented from owning an outdoor grill because of rules and regulations, fire codes, space constraints.

Several years ago, I wrote an entire book on the subject with the straightforward title, Indoor Grilling. It features 270 recipes that can be adapted to fireplaces, contact grills, panini grills, cast iron grill pans, built in or freestanding electric grills, indoor smokers, and even indoor rotisseries.

Indoor grilling belongs to a barbecue tradition that began with our earliest cave-dwelling ancestors. If it’s likely that the first barbecue was accidental—the result of a lightning strike, for example—it’s equally likely that the first deliberate act of grilling took place indoors. After all, archeologists have discovered Paleolithic cave sites containing the remains of prehistoric cooking pits.

The ancient Greeks and Romans certainly grilled indoors as well. The hearth was literally and spiritually the focal point of the home. Indeed, our word focus comes from the Latin word for hearth. The fireplace was the cooking center in the homes of medieval Europe, too.

If you are lucky enough to own a wood-burning fireplace, you can cook foods indoors that are imbued with flavorful wood smoke using all the techniques you’d use outdoors: direct grilling; indirect grilling; smoking; spit-roasting; and grilling in the coals or ashes. In addition to a long-handled grill hoe or garden hoe for raking embers, you’ll need grill gloves and tongs. My Best of Barbecue cast-iron Tuscan Grill is optional, but very useful for direct grilling steaks, chops, fish fillets, chicken breasts, vegetables, and fruits.

There are other ways to get grill marks, of course. Cast-iron grill pans, such as one made by Lodge, cost less than $15. Many panini grills have reversible cooking surfaces—one side is smooth and the other is ridged. They have the advantage of cooking from the top and the bottom, cutting cooking time in half. Perhaps your kitchen even has a built-in electric grill, which is very similar to an outdoor gas grill.

You can even smoke indoors with devices such as Camerons Stovetop Smoker. (I often use mine for hot-smoked salmon. Find the recipe here. Or you can improvise using a foil-topped wok, hotel pan, or covered cake pan. Note: You may want to disable your smoke alarm before attempting to smoke indoors.

Here are several dishes that can easily be adapted to indoor grilling:
Lamb Chops with Herbes de Provence
Cider-Brined Pork Chops
Grilled Veal Chops with Smoking Rosemary
Moroccan Grilled Chicken Kebabs with Charmoula
Barbecued Pork Burgers with Smoked Coleslaw
Chipotle-Marinated Pork Tenderlon
Greek Grilled Shrimp
Trinidadian Grilled Swordfish
Grilled Pepper Salad with Currants, Capers, and Feta
Spice-Grilled Pineapple with Smoky Whipped Cream

Do you have any photos of yourself grilling in your fireplace? Please share them with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or the Barbecue Board.

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Outrage in the 1980s at the cruel conditions under which young calves were raised made Americans lose their appetite for veal. It all but disappeared from restaurant menus and meat counters. Annual per capita consumption dropped from four pounds to about a third of a pound, the equivalent of one measly dinner of wienerschnitzel or veal Parmigiana or osso buco—literally too little to graph.

But a new generation of farmers and ranchers has found a more humane way with veal from healthier animals that are raised outdoors under sustainable humane conditions.

Leading the charge is Strauss Brands, a Milwaukee-based premium meat purveyor that contracts with family farms to supply meat to restaurants, butcher shops, and supermarkets like Whole Foods. Because about 25 percent of the country’s veal comes from Strauss, it is in a strong position to influence the industry. Since 2008, 100 percent of its animals are “group raised” in pens or “free raised,” a trademarked term referring to Limousin calves that are hormone- and antibiotic-free, pastured with their mothers, and never tethered or crated. (Yes, Strauss is the veal we use on my Project Smoke TV show.)

It’s about time. Because tender, lean, sweet-tasting veal is one of the most satisfying meats you can grill. I, for one, have missed it.

Here’s what you should know about the “new” veal:

• The meat from animals allowed to move and forage freely has a beefier flavor and more appealing, rosier color than the pale, iron-deficient, crate-raised veal of the past. (Crates are now outlawed by several states, and are being phased out nationwide thanks to the efforts of the American Veal Association, which advocates raising the animals in groups.)

• Some cuts of veal, like the loin, are leaner than chicken, meaning they should be grilled over a medium-hot (not screaming hot) fire. Don’t overcook. I personally prefer veal that is medium—145 to 150 degrees, meaning it’s slightly pink in the center but still juicy.

• Fattier cuts, like veal brisket or shoulder, respond best to low and slow smoking temperatures. You can also wrap tightly in foil with a bit of liquid to finish.

• Veal absorbs smoke like a sponge. Don’t overwhelm its mild flavor by smoking it too long or over pungent hardwoods like mesquite.

• Look for veal that bears a blue, white, and green sticker reading, “Certified Humane Raised and Handled.” This designation is awarded by Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC), a nonprofit organization that rewards the ethical treatment of farm animals with its endorsement.

• As with all beef, look for USDA prime or choice grades. Buy local meat, organic and grass-fed when possible.

Check out more veal recipes:
Grilled Veal Chops with Smoking Rosemary
Marinated Veal Chops with Catalan Vinaigrette
Thai Veal Burger Sliders with Peanut Sauce
Souvlaki Meatballs

The post The New Veal appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.

Here are some facts about the history of brats to add to your appreciation of this national favorite:

In Germany, there are 42 recognized varieties, most distinguished by their size and the spices used to flavor them. There is even a bratwurst museum in the village of Holzhausen.

Bratwurst from the central German state of Thuringia was the object, in 1432, of one of the first documented food purity laws: Rancid pork, meat other than pork, and parasites were expressly forbidden in its production.

One of the most popular varieties of bratwurst in Germany is the short, finger-thin, marjoram-scented Nürnberger Rostbratwurst, which was first mentioned in print in 1313. Legend has it that a local judge was sentenced to life imprisonment for revealing a political secret, and for the rest of his dungeon-bound life, his family slipped him two of these diminutive sausages through the keyhole of his cell each day. The best way to enjoy Nurnberger Rostbratwurst today is grilled over a pinecone fire.

Brats (the word rhymes with cots, not cats) were introduced to the U.S. by German and Austrian immigrants in the mid-19th century.

What makes a brat a brat? In general terms, there’s the meat (pork; pork and beef; or pork and veal), the grind (coarse), the casing (natural), and the seasonings (which include salt and pepper and sweet spices, like mace or nutmeg).

Always sold fresh (bratwurst are neither cured nor smoked), brats are practically a religion in Wisconsin, especially in the self-anointed “Bratwurst Capital of the World,” Sheboygan. Locals grill them over charcoal and eat them on a special hard-crusted, soft-crumbed roll called a semmel, with brown German mustard, dill pickles, and an optional flourish of diced onions. In this town, it’s considered sacrilege to serve brats on anything resembling a hot dog bun. But you might get away with it in Green Bay or Madison.

Mandatory fare for tailgaters in the Badger State are “double brats” — two brats served on the aforementioned semmel (preferably baked in a brick hearth oven as they are at Sheboygan’s City Bakery) or kaiser roll with condiments.

Milwaukee’s Miller Park, home to the Brewers, is the only baseball stadium in the country that sells more sausages than hot dogs, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.

Johnsonville Sausage, LLC, has been spreading the brat gospel in the U.S. since 1945, when butcher turned sausage mogul Ralph F. Stayer began making bratwurst from a century-old family recipe. The company is still family owned, and is the largest sausage maker by revenue in the America. It also sells its products in 39 other countries.

To test a brat or any grilled sausage for doneness, insert the probe of an instant read thermometer through the end of a brat toward the center. The internal temperature should be 160 degrees F.

Pictured above: Mike Lynch, Executive Chef of Project Smoke

Here are some of my favorite ways to serve brats:

Mile-Long Smoke Brat Sandwich.

The bratwurst “hot tub” which arose to meet a dire need of Packers’ fans and other Wisconsin sports fanatics: how to grill the brats before the kickoff or during halftime and keep them warm and moist so you can enjoy them during the game. If you live in the Badger State, you’re surely familiar with the procedure, and if you don’t, it will quickly become part of your repertory.

When grilling for a crowd — set up the grill for indirect grilling and line up brats by the dozens in tight formation down the center of the grate over drip pans. Toss fistfuls of beer-soaked hickory chips on the coals and close the lid. The brats come off the grill a half hour later bronzed with hickory smoke and snappy crackling-crisp casings. Supernaturally juicy and not a single one split, burned, or caused the sort of volcanic flare-ups you get when you direct grill bratwurst and other fatty fresh sausages.

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The post Celebrate National Bratwurst Day! appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.

This thin, brown, sweet-sour condiment turns up in barbecue sauces of all stripes and types—from the tomato-based sauces of Kansas City to the butter sauces of New Orleans to the black dips of Kentucky. The reason is simple: Worcestershire sauce contains something for everyone—sweetness in the form of corn syrup and molasses, acidity from tamarind and vinegar, saltiness provided by soy sauce and anchovies, with garlic and cloves for spice.

Like mushroom ketchup and A.1. Sauce, Worcestershire was born in the heyday of the great English table sauces. According to David Burton, author of The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, the recipe originated in India and was brought back to England by a former governor of Bengal, Lord Marcus Sandys.

In 1835, Lord Sandys took his recipe to the chemist shop of John Lea and William Perrins on Broad Street in Worcester and asked them to brew up a batch. The resulting mixture was so fiery, it “almost blew the heads off Mrs. Lea and Perrins,” according to Burton. They deposited the barrel in a back corner of the cellar and promptly tried to forget it. The chemists stumbled upon it a few years later, and, morbidly curious, they tried it again. With age, the Worcestershire had mellowed into an extraordinary sauce. The recipe was hastily purchased from Lord Sandys and in 1838, commercial Worcestershire sauce was born.

According to Adrian Bailey and Philip Dowell, authors of Cooks’ Ingredients, the original Lea & Perrins recipe contained walnut and mushroom ketchups, sherry, brandy, and even pork liver, which has been eliminated from the American formula. Today the sauce is enjoyed all over the world. Many companies manufacture Worcestershire sauce today, but no one makes a better one than Lea & Perrins. This is the sauce you should use for the recipes in my books.

Many American rub makers add a freeze-dried Worcestershire sauce to their spice mixes. This flavorful powder is available here.

This blog is excerpted from Barbecue Sauces, Rubs and Marinades.

Here are some recipes that use Worcestershire sauce:
Santa Maria-Style Salsa
Cider Squirt Mop Sauce 
Grill-Blackened Tuna with Cajun Remoulade
Hill Country Brisket with Coca-Cola Barbecue Sauce

The post The History of Worcestershire Sauce appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.